The ROCOR Council of Bishops rejected Metropolitan Sergii’s act of suspension of the ROCOR hierarchy on this day. Metropolitan Sergii (Stragorodskii, d. 1944) was a great canonist and ecclesiologist with a clear, logical thought process. He considered himself a link preserving canonical succession within the Russian Church. Therefore, he suspended those who disagreed with this role: Metropolitans Kirill, Agathangel, and Joseph in Russia and Metropolitans Anthony, Evlogy, and Platon in the diaspora. However, the canonical situation both in Russia and in the diaspora was unprecedentedly decentralized. In this situation, it would have been better for everybody to “live and let live.”Interestingly, the ROCOR hierarchs, who themselves had an unprecedented canonical status, not only suspended Metropolitan Evlogii, but proclaimed in 1926 the sacraments ministered by his clergy void of salvific grace. In this aspect, they were replicating Metropolitan Sergii’s approach abroad. Nowadays, the Moscow Patriarchate is avoiding such steps regarding the Ukrainian Orthodox, who broke away from it in May of 2022 (along the lines of the ROCOR’s separation from Moscow in 1927, about which I wrote yesterday). On July 21, 1934, Metropolitan Sergii and his Synod suspended Metropolitan Anthony of Kiev and Galicia, Archbishop Anastassy of Kishenev and Hotin, Archbishop Melety of Harbin, Archbishop Seraphim of Western Europe, Bishop Nestor of Kamchatka, Bishop Tikhon of Western America, Bishop Viktor of Peking. In responding to this suspension, Metropolitan Anthony showed himself at his best as an ethicist. In his letter to Metropolitan Eleutherios of Lithuania (his diocese was a stronghold of Metropolitan Sergii in Europe), Metropolitan Anthony expressed the essence of church conciliarity in this way: “If we are accountable to him, then he also should have done nothing without consulting us, according to Canon 34 of the Holy Apostles. Nevertheless, he never solicited our opinion for any matter in general, and particularly when he entered into the union with the godless, founded his uncanonical Synod, which is, in my opinion, void of any authority, and when he proclaimed himself Metropolitan of Moscow, during the life of Metropolitan [Peter] of Krutitsy, who is in charge of this diocese before the election of the new patriarch.” In this reminder that canon law cannot be divorced from the moral law and pastoral theology, Metropolitan Anthony spoke in unison with another Metropolitan in Russia, St. Cyril of Kazan, who wrote to Metropolitan Sergii: “[C]hurch discipline is capable of preserving its efficacy only as long as it is an actual reflection of the hierarchical conscience of the Catholic Church; and discipline can never itself replace this conscience. As soon as it produces its demands not by force of the indications of this conscience, but by impulses foreign to the Church and insincere, the individual hierarchal conscience unfailingly will stand on the side of the Catholic-hierarchical principle of the Church’s existence, which is not at all the same thing as outward unity at any cost.” The act of that Council of Bishops rejecting of Metropolitan Sergii’s suspension was signed by St. John (Maximovich), who had been consecrated in June of the same year of 1934 as Bishop of Shanghai in the Russian Trinity church in Belgrade. Supplement Apostolic Canon 34 (4th century, Syriac origin) The bishops of each region (ethnous) must know who is first among them and account him as their head and do nothing of consequence without his consent, but each should do only those things which apply to his own administrative center (paroikia), and the country places which belong to it. But neither let him (who is the first) do anything without the consent of all; for so there will be unanimity, and God will be glorified through the Lord in the Holy Spirit (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers [1979], H. Percival tr. 2nd ser. Ann Arbor, MI, reprint of Oxford 1900, 596. Modified by P.A.P).). Sources Metropolitan Cyrill, “From Epistle No. 2 [to Metropolitan Sergii]:1929,” Russia’s Catacomb Saints, Priestmonk Seraphim (Rose), ed. (Platina, CA 1982) Archbishop Nikon (Rklitskii), Zhizneopisanie Blazheneishago Antoniia Mitropolita Kievskogo I Galitskogo [The Life of the Most Blessed Anthonii Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia] vol 7. (New York, 1961)
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